What Hopatcong's records show about its license plate cameras

What is installed here

Hopatcong operates four Flock Safety Falcon automated license plate reader cameras. They are solar powered and mounted in Sussex County road right-of-way. The program has been active since 2023 and has been renewed through 2027.

An automated license plate reader, or ALPR, photographs the license plate of every vehicle that passes, converts the plate to text, and records the time and location of each sighting. Hopatcong's cameras feed that data into NJ SNAP, New Jersey's statewide ALPR network. Under state Attorney General Directive 2022-12, that network is broadly accessible to state, county, and local law enforcement agencies across New Jersey, so a plate read in Hopatcong is searchable well beyond Hopatcong.

The cameras capture a large volume of everyday traffic, not just vehicles connected to a crime. The Borough's own analytics show 3,185,635 vehicle reads in 2026 through July 9, roughly 15,000 to 22,000 reads per day. One 24-day window, June 16 to July 9, 2026, totaled 594,582 reads.

Stored data is searched by police for stated reasons. Across 864 documented searches, the most common reasons were motor vehicle theft or stolen vehicle (401 searches, 46.4 percent), larceny or theft (106, 12.3 percent), hit and run or car accident (80, 9.3 percent), fleeing or eluding (42), and vandalism (38). Footage auto-deletes on a rolling 30-day basis.

Those top two reasons, motor vehicle theft and larceny or theft, together make up more than 58 percent of all 864 searches, with the remaining categories spread across a long tail of smaller counts. See the full breakdown of all 21 search reasons.

Source: Borough of Hopatcong OPRA response, July 2026.

The central question: were residents told, and did anyone vote?

This is the question at the heart of this site.

Through a formal public records request, we asked the Borough for every record showing a Borough Council vote, resolution, ordinance, or motion authorizing the cameras; the agendas or minutes of any public meeting where the cameras were discussed or approved; any press release, public notice, FAQ, website posting, or community presentation informing residents; and any grant application or funding record for the program.

The Borough produced none of these.

The absence of these records does not by itself prove that no vote or public notice ever happened. Records can be missing from a response because they do not exist, because they were withheld, or because they were simply not included in what the Borough sent. On funding specifically, the custodian did answer directly in writing, even though no funding document was produced: no grant money was used.

What the record establishes is narrower and factual: the Borough has produced nothing documenting a public authorization of these cameras or any public notice to residents about them.

There is also an open legal question, addressed below, about whether a public vote was even required under New Jersey law. The point is not that a rule was necessarily broken. The point is that residents have not been shown any record that they were told, or that their elected Council publicly decided, before a network that logs millions of local vehicle movements a year was switched on.

Why this question matters: what has happened in other towns

Communities across the country have found the same pattern, and the reaction once residents find out has often been swift.

The scale of the reaction

Public tracking projects have counted more than thirty US cities and municipalities that canceled, paused, or deactivated their Flock contracts across 2025 and early 2026, and some counts run higher. NPR and the outlet 404 Media have reported on the trend, much of it driven by residents learning that their local plate data could be reached by outside or federal agencies.

When a vendor understates what the system does

In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the City Council voted to renew its Flock contract, then reversed itself and voted unanimously to rescind that renewal less than 24 hours later. The reversal came after the police chief reported that Flock had given the Council false information: a council member asked whether the system creates a heat map of a vehicle's movements, a Flock representative answered no, and that answer was incorrect, because Flock's own platform includes a heat map feature.

When cameras arrive through a budget line rather than a public vote

In Sterling, Illinois, transparency advocates documented, from city records, that the Flock deal was approved as a line item in the police department's budget with no standalone council vote and no public hearing, and that the word Flock did not appear anywhere on that meeting's agenda. This is close to the pattern Hopatcong's records raise questions about.

The reform some places have adopted

About two dozen US jurisdictions have passed what are called Community Control Over Police Surveillance, or CCOPS, ordinances. These laws require a properly noticed public hearing and an affirmative vote of the local governing body before a police department can acquire surveillance technology such as ALPRs, along with public reporting on cost, purpose, and data sharing.

New Jersey does not require a CCOPS-style public hearing or vote before a municipality acquires ALPR cameras. So the question in Hopatcong is not necessarily whether a law was broken. It is whether residents should have had a say, and a public record, before this began. That is the reform argument, and this page presents it as an argument, not as a finding of wrongdoing.

What is still unknown

These are genuine open questions, not accusations. Each is the subject of a records request or research still in progress.

• Who authorized the program, and under what authority? The original 2023 agreement was signed by the Chief of Police. The only Borough Council votes on record are three routine "bills list" resolutions approving payment after the fact, each one line among 140 or more unrelated vendor payments, with no separate vote, discussion, or agenda item naming the camera program. Separately, when Sussex County required a letter confirming the Borough had authorized the program, that letter was drafted by a police detective sergeant and signed only by the Borough Administrator; no Council resolution is referenced anywhere in it. What is not yet documented is whether any ordinance or resolution actually delegates authority for a decision like this to the Chief of Police or the Administrator.
• Which specific budget line pays for it? The custodian confirmed directly that no grant money was used; this is entirely Borough, meaning local taxpayer, funding. The program is funded through a dedicated Police Department budget line, account 3-01-25-240-000-256, labeled "Police - License Plate Reader." What is not yet documented is when that account was created and by what mechanism, the original 2023 budget adoption or a later budget amendment ordinance.
• Why were the locations hidden? The four Sussex County road-opening permits all had their location fields redacted. The Borough's stated legal justification is now on record in full: it cites state statute and Government Records Council exemptions covering computer security, building security, and surveillance tactics. That justification has been formally challenged in a letter to Chief McCluskey, arguing these are visible, pole-mounted cameras on public roads and that the locations are already identifiable without the Borough's help. All four camera locations have since been identified through FlockHopper, a community-built ALPR camera map, and are plotted on our interactive map. These are community-sourced coordinates, not confirmed by the Borough or the county, since the Borough has never released the locations itself.
• Who else has queried Hopatcong's data? The NJ SNAP standard is broad access among New Jersey law enforcement. The Borough has confirmed that 26 Hopatcong officers hold search accounts, but has not named any specific outside agency that has actually searched Hopatcong's plate reads. The Borough cites NJ AG Directive 2022-12, Section 7.1, which classifies stored ALPR data as a "criminal investigatory record" that cannot be shared outside law enforcement without a subpoena or court order, as the reason no such list is tracked or disclosed. That explains the Borough's legal basis for withholding a list. It does not answer whether any outside agency has actually queried Hopatcong's data.
• Are any private cameras tied in? Nationally, some Flock cameras owned by homeowners associations or businesses feed into the same police network. Whether any private cameras in Hopatcong are connected is not yet known.
• What were the reported violations? State ALPR audits recorded 2 minor violations in 2024 and 5 minor violations in 2025, with zero significant violations and zero citizen complaints in either year. The Borough has explained the 2025 violations: all five were failures to enter a case number into the system, a recordkeeping lapse, not a confirmed case of misuse. The 2024 violations remain unexplained; Chief McCluskey has said she does not yet have that audit from the state herself.

Sources: Borough of Hopatcong OPRA response, July 2026, and Hopatcong Ordinance 38-3. Items marked as open are not established in the record.

See the records for yourself

This page is a summary. The documents the Borough released are available in the records section, so you can read the contracts, invoices, permits, and audit forms yourself and check every figure here against the source.